Sat, Dec 14, 2002

I assume that many of you fellow right-wing conspirators have heard about Joel Rosenberg's gripping page-turner "The Last Jihad" by now, but have you bought or read it? If you like to read fiction, especially fiction that eerily foreshadows fact, you must add this one to your library.

At a hearing this Wednesday, Congress unfortunately made little progress in its bid to unravel a web of Saudi deceit on a number of child abduction cases where American citizen children are unable to leave the desert prison of Saudi Arabia.

Fri, Dec 13, 2002

Trent Lott, the Republican Party's eternal Maalox moment, has
given the Beltway's liberal pontiffs on race exactly what they crave: a big,
fat excuse to extract legislative payoffs to ease their collective "pain."

'Tis the season of comfort and joy, family warmth and religious
rebirth. What better way to celebrate than buying your precious young son a
video game that lets him imagine himself as a murderous, whoring cocaine
dealer?

"Surely one can burn a cross in the sanctity of one's bedroom," Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia noted this week during oral arguments in the case of Virginia v. Black. The case deals with whether or not cross-burning constitutes free speech.

First, let's establish what the Trent Lott imbroglio is not.
This is not just another case of liberals attempting to smear a good
conservative as a racist just because he happens to oppose any of the left's
pet positions on racial preferences or immigration.

This week, when federal authorities arrested
workers at Chicago's O'Hare and Midway Airports for unlawfully possessing
security badges, "open borders" advocates were outraged because several of
those apprehended were illegal immigrants.

When Mayor Michael Bloomberg first proposed that New York City
ban smoking in all bars and restaurants, one of his aides made a revealing
comment to The New York Times. He said: "The mayor will push this for all
the same reasons he pushed the cigarette tax."

Anybody can put his foot in his mouth but making it a habit is
too much, especially when you are in a position where your ill-considered
words can become a permanent albatross around the necks of other people whom
you are leading.

Beware the Christmas office party. There's many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip, whether loose or puckered up. The U.S. Department of Labor advises employers to pour the ferment gingerly and never offer one "for the road." This will avoid lawsuits (and maybe save a life as well).

Christmas is coming. You can hardly help noticing, what with Bing Crosby in the elevator, long lines at the mall, the crowded, insistent messages of the season: Buy this, eat that, do good, give some more, get some more, want some more, had enough?

As Christmas approaches, American Christians might take note of
the intolerance here. Their sacred shrines -- and some belonging to
Judaism -- are under threat from the Islamofascists of the Palestinian
Authority.

It is a mystery to liberals why conservatives are so adamant
about cutting taxes. To them, the conservative fervor for tax cuts --
anytime, anywhere -- is irrational; almost a religious belief that is
accepted on faith without any supporting evidence.

Although the White House is not ready to initiate military action in Iraq just yet, it is poised to move one step closer to that likely eventuality by the end of the week by declaring Iraq to be in “material breach” of its United Nations-imposed obligations.

Trent Lott must resign as Senate majority leader. It's not
just that no one who has said this can lead an American political party.
It's that no one who could say something like this
should be an American leader.

Wed, Dec 11, 2002

Some years, it is hard to find enough good new books to
recommend to buy as Christmas presents, so I have had to recommend old
favorites like The Federalist Papers or recommend gift subscriptions to
magazines like The Economist.

I constitute one of his biggest defenders simply because I don't think he should be dumped from the GOP leadership because he's allegedly racist. I think he should be dumped because he's politically stupid.

In a recent speech, former President Bill Clinton grudgingly praised Republicans for stealing traditional Democratic issues, but failed to mention that his party is developing a new level of sophistication in co-opting issues itself.

As the Watergate scandal of 1973-1974 diverted attention from the far greater tragedy unfolding in Southeast Asia, so, too, the scandal of predator-priests now afflicting the Catholic Church may be covering up a far greater calamity.

It was a strange sight. The day before the Berkeley, Calif.,
mayoral election, a gray, 60ish man grabbed stacks of the University of
California at Berkeley Daily Californian and surreptitiously threw them in
the garbage.

The shake-up on President Bush's economic team, with the firing of Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and National Economic Council Director Lawrence Lindsey, is an important first step toward improving economic policy.

Mon, Dec 09, 2002

Just as the Battle of Gettysburg was about far more than who would control the tiny Pennsylvania town, so the Battle of Augusta National Golf Club is taking on an importance far beyond the issue of whether the famed Georgia club admits women as members.

George Wallace, Orval Faubus and Ross Barnett were men before their time. They were merely infamous Southern governors, trying to keep their public schools segregated. They failed, but only because they never got an education at Stanford, Penn or MIT.

You know, we are trained not to be sorry for the rich, but I confess to yielding to that weakness where it's the very rich who are ridiculed. The term "billionaire" is -- check this out -- almost always used derisively, or condescendingly.

Even after President Bush decided he needed a new face at the Treasury, Paul O'Neill still did not have a clue as to what was happening. He was talking tax increases when the president had decided on tax cuts.

Defining bankruptcy--which actually is in United's and the nation's interest--as failure, the ad declared: ``Failure is not an option.'' Actually, failure is a fact, and was long before Wednesday's ATSB decision denying United's plea.

Wednesday night I tuned in just in time to hear Connie and her guest Jane Franklin, author of "Cuba and the United States," discussing the longevity of some of the world's most successful tyrants -Saddam Hussein and that perennial favorite, Fidel Castro.